PhD defence: Cancer under pressure: metabolic adaptations and drug resistance

PLEASE NOTE: The candidate gives a layman's talk, therefore the livestream will start fifteen minutes earlier.

Cancer cells can survive in difficult conditions by changing the way they use nutrients and produce energy. This flexibility helps them continue growing and makes them harder to kill with treatment, but it also creates weaknesses that could be targeted with new therapies.

This thesis investigates how these changes help cancer cells resist treatment in multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, and colorectal cancer. The research shows that, in multiple myeloma, cells in the surrounding bone marrow help protect cancer cells from an important drug by changing how they produce energy and use nutrients. Drug-resistant cancer cells also become dependent on a specific metabolic pathway, and blocking this pathway makes them sensitive to treatment again. In colorectal cancer, the study reveals a previously unknown role for the gene DHFR2 in controlling how cells process nutrients and shows that higher levels of this gene are linked to poorer patient outcomes.

Overall, these findings improve our understanding of how cancer cells adapt to survive treatment and identify new weaknesses that could be used to develop more effective therapies and reduce treatment resistance.